Review:

I got this as a free book on some Amazon promotion. It's an oldfashioned "gateway to a fantasy world" story, like the Narnia books or the Magicians trilogy.

Did not like it much: it's slow-paced, the characters are shallow, and the "magical world" just looks like a boring version of the middle ages with an arbitrary and largely undescribed magic system, and a random evil race of tree-dwelling blue spider-monkeys. And then it just ends, expecting the reader to go pay for more. Sorry, no.